The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg by Robert Silverberg (Vols. 1~9)
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Overview: Robert Silverberg (born January 15, 1935) is a prolific American author and editor, best known for writing science fiction. He is a multiple winner of both Hugo and Nebula Awards, a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, a Grand Master of SF
This series brings together most of Robert Silverberg's prolific short story output in chronological order.With introductions to each volume and commentary to the stories this collection showcases the singular genius of one of 20th Century literature's leading figure's.
Genre: Science Fiction > Short Stories > Collections
The Collected Stories Vol. 1 - To Be Continued: 1953 - 58:
The first in a series of volumes of Silverberg's ( The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party ) Hugo and Nebula Award-winning stories among others, this collection serves as a gallery in which old and new fans may fall under the master's spell. Whether he has set his tale on the cold, unforgiving surface of Pluto or within a Los Angeles enslaved by aliens, Silverberg is unparalleled in dramatizing the human heart. The average marriage pales next to the intense passion achieved by a pair of loving telepaths separated by thousands of miles. A professional con man who sells bum pardons to prisoners in alien work camps finds himself bewitched by the eyes of the judge who must pass sentence on his crimes--a judge who, years earlier, was conned by him. And in the 35th century, when only one person in a million grows old, a devoted android searches the world for his aging, humiliated lover. Such stories resonate; however, when Silverberg becomes preoccupied with merely clever ideas, such as an ancient extraterrestrial computer bent on taking over the world, he's lost in space. But these very few failures are nothing more than fanciful what-ifs from an author whose work continues to expand the boundaries of the science fiction genre.
The Collected Stories Vol 2 - To the Dark Star: 1962-69
This story, “To See the Invisible Man,†written in June of 1962, marks the beginning of my real career as a science-fiction writer, I think. The 1953-58 stories collected in To Be Continued, the first of this series of volumes, are respectable professional work, some better than others but all of them at least minimally acceptableâ€"but most of them could have been written by just about anyone. Aside from a few particularly ambitious items, they were designed to slip unobtrusively into the magazines of their time, efficiently providing me with regular paychecks. But now, by freeing me from the need to calculate my way around the risk of rejection, Fred Pohl allowedâ€"indeed, requiredâ€"me to reach as deep into my literary resources as I was capable of doing. I knew that unless I gave him my very best, the wonderful guaranteed-sale deal I had with him would vanish as quickly as it had appeared. Therefore I would reach deeper and deeper, in the years ahead, until I had moved so far away from my youthful career as a hack writer that latecomers would find it hard to believe that I had been emotionally capable of writing all that junk, let alone willing to do it. In “To See the Invisible Man†the distinctive Silverberg fictional voice is on display for just about the first time.
The Collected Stories Vol 3 - Something Wild is Loose: 1969-72
"The world that these stories sprang from was the troubled, bewildering, dangerous, and very exciting world of those weird years when the barriers were down and the future was rushing into the present with the force of a river unleashed. But of course I think these stories speak to our times, too, and that most of them will remain valid as we go staggering onward through the brave new world of the twenty-first century. I am not one of those who believes that all is lost and the end is nigh. Like William Faulkner, I do think we will somehow endure and prevail against increasingly stiff odds.
The Collected Stories Vol 4 - Trips: 1972-73
The stories here, all of them written between March of 1972 and November of 1973, mark a critical turning point in my career. Those who know the three earlier volumes have traced my evolution from a capable journeyman, very young and as much concerned with paying the rent as he was to advancing the state of the art, into a serious, dedicated craftsman now seeking to leave his mark on science fiction in some significant way. Throughout the decade of the 1960s I had attempted to grow and evolve within the field of writing I loved--building on the best that went before me, the work of Theodore Sturgeon and James Blish and Cyril Kornbluth and Jack Vance and Philip K. Dick and half a dozen others whose great stories had been beacons beckoning me onwardâ€"and then, as I reached my own maturity, now trying to bring science fiction along with me into a new realm of development, hauling it along even farther out of its pulp-magazine origins toward what I regarded as a more resonant and evocative kind of visionary storytelling.
The Collected Stories Vol 5 - The Palace at Midnight: 1980-82
Somehow, for all my outward pretence of cold-eyed professionalism, all my insistence that writing is simply a job like any other, I’ve discovered to my surprise and chagrin that there’s more than that going on around here, that I write as much out of karmic necessity and some inescapable inner need to rededicate my own skills constantly to myâ€"what? My craft? My art? My profession? I wrote these stories because the only way of earning a living I have ever had has been by writing, but mainly, I have to admit, I wrote these stories because I couldn’t not write them. Well, so be it. They involved me in a lot of hard work, but for me, at least, the results justify the toil. I’m glad I wrote them. Writing them, it turns out, was important for me, and even pleasurable, in a curiously complex after-the-fact kind of way. May they give you pleasure now too.
The Collected Stories Vol 6 - Multiples: 1983-87
By the time this present group of stories was written I had passed through the cultural turbulence that engulfed nearly everyone’s life in the wild, stormy period we know as “the Sixties,†which for me had actually lasted from 1968 to 1974 or 1975. I had come through my own angry four-year-long retirement from writing in the middle 1970s, and was working again at a steady pace, though not with the frenetic prolificacy of the pre-retirement years. At the beginning of this period my personal life was still pretty chaotic, a carryover from all that Sixties madness, and plenty of new chaos was going to descend on me while some of these stories were written, but I was tiptoeing toward an escape from the various messes that were complicating my life, and by the time the last five stories of this volume were being written I was heading into the stability of my second marriage.
The Collected Stories Vol 7 - We Are for the Dark: 1987 - 90
The stories collected here, written between August of 1987 and May of 1990, demonstrate that I still believe in the classical unities. Of course, what seems to us a unity now might not have appeared that way when H.G. Wells was writing his wonderful stories in the nineteenth century. Wells might have argued that my 'To the Promised Land' is built around two speculative fantastic assumptions, one that the Biblical Exodus from Egypt never happened, the other that it is possible to send rocketships to other worlds. But in fact we've sent plenty of rocketships to other worlds by now, so only my story's alternative-world speculation remains fantasy today. Technically speaking the space-travel element of the plot has become part of the given; it's the other big assumption that forms the central matter of the story. ―Robert Silverberg, from his Introduction
The Collected Stories Vol. 8 - Hot Times in Magma City: 1990 - 95
"The stories in this volume were written between July of 1990 and March of 1995-the second half of the fifth decade of my career as a science-fiction writer. I don't think I could have imagined, when I began that career in the early 1950s, that science-fiction publishing would evolve the way it did over the next forty years. Here, then, is the cream of the Silverberg output, 1990-95. I suppose I wrote more short stories in the first six months of 1957 than in that entire six-year period; but so be it. It's a different world today. I look back nostalgically on the small-town atmosphere of the era in which I began my career, and there are times when I'd be glad to 'call back yesterday, bid time return.' As Shakespeare pointed out, though, that can't be done. The one recourse is the one I have chosen, which is to soldier staunchly onward through the years, come what may, writing a story or two here and a book there, while the world changes out of all recognition around me. And so-to leap neatly from the Bard of Avon to F. Scott Fitzgerald-'so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'" -Robert Silverberg, from the Introduction
The Collected Stories Vol 9 - The Millennium Express: 1995-2009
But, for all that, I went on writing short fiction all through the seventh and eighth decades of my life, and though I’m not very active these days, I would still pay attention if someone were to approach me with an interesting and challenging short-story project, or if some absolutely irresistible story idea were to come into my mind. I will not, at this point, try to claim that the stories that are collected here are the last short stories I will ever write. Surely some editor, in the years ahead, will tickle my imagination with a proposal I can’t resist. But I doubt that will be happening very often; and, meanwhile, here’s the harvest of the fourteen years that began in 1995â€"not an enormous number of stories, no, but stories nevertheless that I think are worth reading and reprinting.
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Overview: Robert Silverberg (born January 15, 1935) is a prolific American author and editor, best known for writing science fiction. He is a multiple winner of both Hugo and Nebula Awards, a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, a Grand Master of SF
This series brings together most of Robert Silverberg's prolific short story output in chronological order.With introductions to each volume and commentary to the stories this collection showcases the singular genius of one of 20th Century literature's leading figure's.
Genre: Science Fiction > Short Stories > Collections
The Collected Stories Vol. 1 - To Be Continued: 1953 - 58:
The first in a series of volumes of Silverberg's ( The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party ) Hugo and Nebula Award-winning stories among others, this collection serves as a gallery in which old and new fans may fall under the master's spell. Whether he has set his tale on the cold, unforgiving surface of Pluto or within a Los Angeles enslaved by aliens, Silverberg is unparalleled in dramatizing the human heart. The average marriage pales next to the intense passion achieved by a pair of loving telepaths separated by thousands of miles. A professional con man who sells bum pardons to prisoners in alien work camps finds himself bewitched by the eyes of the judge who must pass sentence on his crimes--a judge who, years earlier, was conned by him. And in the 35th century, when only one person in a million grows old, a devoted android searches the world for his aging, humiliated lover. Such stories resonate; however, when Silverberg becomes preoccupied with merely clever ideas, such as an ancient extraterrestrial computer bent on taking over the world, he's lost in space. But these very few failures are nothing more than fanciful what-ifs from an author whose work continues to expand the boundaries of the science fiction genre.
The Collected Stories Vol 2 - To the Dark Star: 1962-69
This story, “To See the Invisible Man,†written in June of 1962, marks the beginning of my real career as a science-fiction writer, I think. The 1953-58 stories collected in To Be Continued, the first of this series of volumes, are respectable professional work, some better than others but all of them at least minimally acceptableâ€"but most of them could have been written by just about anyone. Aside from a few particularly ambitious items, they were designed to slip unobtrusively into the magazines of their time, efficiently providing me with regular paychecks. But now, by freeing me from the need to calculate my way around the risk of rejection, Fred Pohl allowedâ€"indeed, requiredâ€"me to reach as deep into my literary resources as I was capable of doing. I knew that unless I gave him my very best, the wonderful guaranteed-sale deal I had with him would vanish as quickly as it had appeared. Therefore I would reach deeper and deeper, in the years ahead, until I had moved so far away from my youthful career as a hack writer that latecomers would find it hard to believe that I had been emotionally capable of writing all that junk, let alone willing to do it. In “To See the Invisible Man†the distinctive Silverberg fictional voice is on display for just about the first time.
The Collected Stories Vol 3 - Something Wild is Loose: 1969-72
"The world that these stories sprang from was the troubled, bewildering, dangerous, and very exciting world of those weird years when the barriers were down and the future was rushing into the present with the force of a river unleashed. But of course I think these stories speak to our times, too, and that most of them will remain valid as we go staggering onward through the brave new world of the twenty-first century. I am not one of those who believes that all is lost and the end is nigh. Like William Faulkner, I do think we will somehow endure and prevail against increasingly stiff odds.
The Collected Stories Vol 4 - Trips: 1972-73
The stories here, all of them written between March of 1972 and November of 1973, mark a critical turning point in my career. Those who know the three earlier volumes have traced my evolution from a capable journeyman, very young and as much concerned with paying the rent as he was to advancing the state of the art, into a serious, dedicated craftsman now seeking to leave his mark on science fiction in some significant way. Throughout the decade of the 1960s I had attempted to grow and evolve within the field of writing I loved--building on the best that went before me, the work of Theodore Sturgeon and James Blish and Cyril Kornbluth and Jack Vance and Philip K. Dick and half a dozen others whose great stories had been beacons beckoning me onwardâ€"and then, as I reached my own maturity, now trying to bring science fiction along with me into a new realm of development, hauling it along even farther out of its pulp-magazine origins toward what I regarded as a more resonant and evocative kind of visionary storytelling.
The Collected Stories Vol 5 - The Palace at Midnight: 1980-82
Somehow, for all my outward pretence of cold-eyed professionalism, all my insistence that writing is simply a job like any other, I’ve discovered to my surprise and chagrin that there’s more than that going on around here, that I write as much out of karmic necessity and some inescapable inner need to rededicate my own skills constantly to myâ€"what? My craft? My art? My profession? I wrote these stories because the only way of earning a living I have ever had has been by writing, but mainly, I have to admit, I wrote these stories because I couldn’t not write them. Well, so be it. They involved me in a lot of hard work, but for me, at least, the results justify the toil. I’m glad I wrote them. Writing them, it turns out, was important for me, and even pleasurable, in a curiously complex after-the-fact kind of way. May they give you pleasure now too.
The Collected Stories Vol 6 - Multiples: 1983-87
By the time this present group of stories was written I had passed through the cultural turbulence that engulfed nearly everyone’s life in the wild, stormy period we know as “the Sixties,†which for me had actually lasted from 1968 to 1974 or 1975. I had come through my own angry four-year-long retirement from writing in the middle 1970s, and was working again at a steady pace, though not with the frenetic prolificacy of the pre-retirement years. At the beginning of this period my personal life was still pretty chaotic, a carryover from all that Sixties madness, and plenty of new chaos was going to descend on me while some of these stories were written, but I was tiptoeing toward an escape from the various messes that were complicating my life, and by the time the last five stories of this volume were being written I was heading into the stability of my second marriage.
The Collected Stories Vol 7 - We Are for the Dark: 1987 - 90
The stories collected here, written between August of 1987 and May of 1990, demonstrate that I still believe in the classical unities. Of course, what seems to us a unity now might not have appeared that way when H.G. Wells was writing his wonderful stories in the nineteenth century. Wells might have argued that my 'To the Promised Land' is built around two speculative fantastic assumptions, one that the Biblical Exodus from Egypt never happened, the other that it is possible to send rocketships to other worlds. But in fact we've sent plenty of rocketships to other worlds by now, so only my story's alternative-world speculation remains fantasy today. Technically speaking the space-travel element of the plot has become part of the given; it's the other big assumption that forms the central matter of the story. ―Robert Silverberg, from his Introduction
The Collected Stories Vol. 8 - Hot Times in Magma City: 1990 - 95
"The stories in this volume were written between July of 1990 and March of 1995-the second half of the fifth decade of my career as a science-fiction writer. I don't think I could have imagined, when I began that career in the early 1950s, that science-fiction publishing would evolve the way it did over the next forty years. Here, then, is the cream of the Silverberg output, 1990-95. I suppose I wrote more short stories in the first six months of 1957 than in that entire six-year period; but so be it. It's a different world today. I look back nostalgically on the small-town atmosphere of the era in which I began my career, and there are times when I'd be glad to 'call back yesterday, bid time return.' As Shakespeare pointed out, though, that can't be done. The one recourse is the one I have chosen, which is to soldier staunchly onward through the years, come what may, writing a story or two here and a book there, while the world changes out of all recognition around me. And so-to leap neatly from the Bard of Avon to F. Scott Fitzgerald-'so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'" -Robert Silverberg, from the Introduction
The Collected Stories Vol 9 - The Millennium Express: 1995-2009
But, for all that, I went on writing short fiction all through the seventh and eighth decades of my life, and though I’m not very active these days, I would still pay attention if someone were to approach me with an interesting and challenging short-story project, or if some absolutely irresistible story idea were to come into my mind. I will not, at this point, try to claim that the stories that are collected here are the last short stories I will ever write. Surely some editor, in the years ahead, will tickle my imagination with a proposal I can’t resist. But I doubt that will be happening very often; and, meanwhile, here’s the harvest of the fourteen years that began in 1995â€"not an enormous number of stories, no, but stories nevertheless that I think are worth reading and reprinting.
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